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scattered and chased all the terrified mourners in different directions, so that Simon was forced to lift up the hem of his robe and leap over the roots and fallen branches as he scrambled through the forest towards safety.
    Thus, for just a few minutes, Hannah Polikov seemed to the spirits not only dead and buried, but also quite definitely forgotten by all those who might have remembered her.
    Nine months later, Hannah gave birth to a son; they named the child Judah ben Simon—in honor of Simon’s father, who had been called Jacob, and according to the Biblical fashion.
    Everyone hailed the birth as a miracle. The people hesitated to rejoice too openly, for fear of attracting the spirits, who might try to compensate for their temporary negligence by harming the baby. Yet there was not one villager who did not awaken with a smile on his face every morning for weeks after the event; and, in the hazy obscurity of the May twilight, they tiptoed to each other’s houses with bottles of sweet wine and platters of cake.
    “You know,” said Rabbi Eliezer, who realized that his listener’s attention had begun to wander, “it has always struck me as odd, in a cheerful sort of way, that even the most downtrodden societies should rejoice so sincerely whenever another child is pushed headfirst into the harshness of their world.”
    “Yes,” nodded Casimir vaguely. Despite himself, he had been remembering his own pale, distant mother, who had spent her short life shivering like an aspen, whose death he had not learned of until she had successively missed four of her weekly visits to the nursery; even more distressing was the king’s memory of his father, which, by now, consisted of only a few sensory images—the sweet, sickly odors of hair pomade and vodka, and the droning sound of long, tearful monologues on the pains of being sovereign.
    “Tell me,” murmured Casimir finally, “is this the case with all parents, that the desire for children drives them to stop at nothing? If babies start out their lives so loved and wanted, why are there so many unhappy men in the world?”
    Rabbi Eliezer stared at him in disbelief until he realized that the boy was not joking. “I see now,” said the old man softly, as if to himself, “why certain country people think the king’s palace has its foundations built on whipped cream.
    “King Casimir,” he continued more loudly, “I am afraid that many people do not bear their children out of pure love. There are a few men who, fearing death, think they will be immortalized in a son; others, dissatisfied with their lives, are looking for an opportunity to start over again. But these things are so obvious that I need hardly go into them; you will find them out for yourself if you just live long enough, or have the good fortune to escape briefly from this—if I may say so—unreal court.
    “Yet it is also true that there are men and women, like the two in my story, who develop a fierce love for their children before they are even born, and who continue to love them all the way into the other world.”
    “And were your parents of this sort?” asked Casimir.
    Taken by surprise, Eliezer frowned for a second, then turned to the boy with a newly open and unguarded expression. “That is something,” he smiled, “which one can never definitely decide about his own case.”
    “Thank you,” answered the King of Poland quietly. “That is mainly what I wanted to know.”
    Then, with the atmosphere in the room somehow indefinably lighter, the Rabbi Eliezer resumed his tale.

IV
    T HROUGHOUT THE EARLY MONTHS of Judah ben Simon’s life, his parents awoke each day with the fear that their good fortune might prove to be a dream of the previous night. Every morning, they lay in bed warily, afraid to move until they heard the baby’s first cries. Then they rushed to the crib and spent hours marveling at their son, until the scholar remembered to begin his prayers, and his wife went off to make